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Details announced of first London Contemporary Music Festival

Now here’s a thing. Not far behind the London Ear, which had its first incarnation in March, another new music festival for London: the London Contemporary Music Festival. Not long ago it was easy to gripe about the lack of really adventurous new music programming in London. But now? This is starting to look like a sea change.

LCMF takes a different line from the Ear, and if they both survive into future editions there’s no reason they couldn’t be complimentary. Whereas the Ear focused very much on neglected works and composers of a – for want of a better expression – late modernist bent, LCMF is casting its net deliberately wider, to incorporate sound art, experimentalism, music theatre, dance/electronica and improv as well as more ‘conventional’ new music from the classical tradition. Such eclecticism is often a sign that the curators are actually playing things safe, but in most of the programming here that doesn’t look to be the case.

(I’m gonna say it because otherwise someone else will – there are some weird typographical things among the festival’s materials (“Xannis Zenakis”? “X is for Henry Flynt”?). But quibbles aside this looks like an outstanding operation.)

I have a feeling that I once heard Lachenmann praise the quality of Morricone’s work, while maintaining that it belonged to a different type of artistic endeavour (it being for commercial entertainment). It was either that or he claimed to kicking back and listening to Mantovani, but that seems even more unlikely…

What I would give to have one or two more contemporary music festivals like this running in Melbourne, Australia. At the moment, I believe all is gambled almost exclusively on the programming of the Metropolis New Music Festival and whatever acts/performances rare and random make their way here for the International Festival.